THEY'LL EVENTUALLY GET TO THE ROOT CAUSES.

Common Dreams columnist Sam Pizzigati would like to penalize college football for hoarding. He makes one of the easy points: it's a strange sort of amateur athletics that's all about the money.  "How did we end up with this mix of privilege and entitlement, with college football teams that more and more run, in one critic’s words, 'as discrete commercial animals living tax-free and happy in the wilds of the American university system'?" Tax free, perhaps, but not necessarily happy.

It being a Common Dreams post, the rent seeking is there, if not specifically so named.

[Oilman and corporate raider T. Boone] Pickens resolved to blaze a more noble pigskin future. In 1983, after a tough Oklahoma State football loss to Kansas State, he gave the OSU football program $100,000. Twenty years later, he upped his giving ante, donating $20 million for renovating Oklahoma State’s football stadium.

The next big Pickens move would rewire the college football economy. Early in 2006, Oklahoma State announced a $165-million Pickens donation to the school’s football enterprise, the largest single donation in college football history. By the end of 2009, the seating capacity of Oklahoma State’s Boone Pickens Stadium had climbed to over 60,000 and players were marveling at their dazzling new state-of-the-art amenities for everything from dining and studying plays to lifting weights and passing time.

Now deep-pockets had been bestowing their largesse upon college football programs long before T. Boone Pickens started cascading dollars. But never at the level Pickens was suddenly playing at. To compete in the new Pickens era, college football programs would clearly have to up their games. Donations of a few million here and few million there would no longer suffice. College athletic directors had to be enticing eight-digit donations, not seven, nine-digit donations, not eight.

That is often the way of positional arms races, but like any other arms race, it ends up badly.

College football fans saw other consequences of the new economic order that Pickens and his fellow plutocrats had ushered in. Saturday afternoons in the fall had traditionally been the time for college football games and all the pageantry around them. In college football’s new reality, football conferences began signing TV deals that had them playing their games on fan- and student-unfriendly weekday nights.

Conference officials felt they had no choice. How else could they keep the money flowing in at anywhere near the new rates that America’s richest had made the new must-meet standard?

Short answer: they can't. Is it any accident that the Mid-American Conference bailed on football first? I leave to others with a closer understanding of their conferences to contemplate the correlation between Democrat governors and locked down states and the Big Ten, er fourteen, and Pacific Twelve also bailing, whilst the developmental leagues with party schools attached continue to play.

Finally, though, he gets to the Neglected Actor.  "Things like uncompensated college football players getting asked to jeopardize their health playing a game that’s catapulting their coaches into the ranks of the nation’s richest 1 percent."  Make that, and uncompensated, while participating in a risky investment in which somewhere between one in fifty and one in a thousand participants gets that call on draft day.

Where is the observer of the sports labor markets who will get people thinking about the connections between performers in the professional leagues showing their sympathy with protests against police who come off like occupying armies in the big cities, and the urban school systems that might not produce much literacy and numeracy, but they sure turn out pro players.